Wenyan Li


2021

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Voice Query Auto Completion
Raphael Tang | Karun Kumar | Kendra Chalkley | Ji Xin | Liming Zhang | Wenyan Li | Gefei Yang | Yajie Mao | Junho Shin | Geoffrey Craig Murray | Jimmy Lin
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Query auto completion (QAC) is the task of predicting a search engine user’s final query from their intermediate, incomplete query. In this paper, we extend QAC to the streaming voice search setting, where automatic speech recognition systems produce intermediate transcriptions as users speak. Naively applying existing methods fails because the intermediate transcriptions often don’t form prefixes or even substrings of the final transcription. To address this issue, we propose to condition QAC approaches on intermediate transcriptions to complete voice queries. We evaluate our models on a speech-enabled smart television with real-life voice search traffic, finding that this ASR-aware conditioning improves the completion quality. Our best method obtains an 18% relative improvement in mean reciprocal rank over previous methods.

2020

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An Attentive Recurrent Model for Incremental Prediction of Sentence-final Verbs
Wenyan Li | Alvin Grissom II | Jordan Boyd-Graber
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

Verb prediction is important for understanding human processing of verb-final languages, with practical applications to real-time simultaneous interpretation from verb-final to verb-medial languages. While previous approaches use classical statistical models, we introduce an attention-based neural model to incrementally predict final verbs on incomplete sentences in Japanese and German SOV sentences. To offer flexibility to the model, we further incorporate synonym awareness. Our approach both better predicts the final verbs in Japanese and German and provides more interpretable explanations of why those verbs are selected.